I promised more news as I had time to play with the deeper features. I have now set up spaces and I think it will be a real boon to those of us who regularly have lots of apps and windows open. Especially on machines with a single monitor (e.g., MacBook). A few points:

You can set up numerous “spaces.” These are a bit like different desktops that you can assign different functions or work groups.

You can assign apps to load in specific spaces. So, for example, I have 4 spaces set up. In #1 I have Safari and Entourage. Any time they load, they load into Space 1. In #2 I have MarsEdit and NetNewsWire. In #3 I have NisusWriter (which has a beta you must download for Leopard, see here). And in #4 I have Accordance (which also has a minor update for Leopard).

Using F8 you can quickly see your spaces and you can even drag windows from one space to another:

Even better, while in this F8 mode, you can invoke Exposé to see all the windows in each space:

You can move from one app to the other in the same ways as always: choose from the Dock, cmd-tab, but now you also can use ctrl-number to select a space (e.g., ctrl-4 for my Accordance workspace), ctrl-arrow, or use the menu bar drop down.

All in all, this is a great organizing and therefore time saving feature for me. As Leo Laporte mentioned on his blog, others have made such programs for the Mac and Windows (and I had tried them all on the Mac), but Apple has integrated it so well it works seamlessly.

5 thoughts on “Leopard Report: Spaces”

Indeed Travis, they have. And there have been apps for Mac OS X as well, but as far as my favorite OS is concerned this is the simplest, cleanest, and best implementation. It really is quite simple and already incredibly useful. (And I had really tried to get some of those other apps to work, but they just were too clunky. No this version.)

I tried some of the 3rd party stuff myself for windows (including the powertoy that Microsoft put out) and I agree, it is very well made. 3rd party solutions for this kind of stuff are usually clunky.

Since we are on the topic of Leopard, have you figured out what the “super secret features” jobs mentioned at his keynote that he didnt want MS to steal awhile ago are? I’ve been poking around online but I haven’t found anything yet.